eyes, to make them live again in a new
and immortal world; he stimulates the whole mind and appeals to every
faculty of the soul. The greatest philosophers are, like Plato, poets
too; and unless the historian is also a poet, there is no inspiration,
no life in what he writes. It is as superficial and vulgar to sneer at
poetry as to sneer at religion; and they alone are mockers who have eyes
but for some counterfeit. To be able to read a true poet is not a gift
of Nature; it is a faculty to be acquired. He creates, as Wordsworth
says, the taste by which he is appreciated. To imagine we may read him
as we read a frivolous novel is absurd; it may well happen we shall see
no truth or beauty in him until patient study has made it plain. It
often takes the world a hundred years or more to recognize a great poet;
and a knowledge of his worth can be had by the student only at the price
of patient labor. Wordsworth will attract scarcely any one at the first
glance; the great number of readers will soon weary of him and throw him
aside; but those who learn to understand him find in his writings
treasures above all price. There are but a few great poems in the
literatures of the different nations, but he who wishes to have a
cultivated mind must, at the cost of whatever time and labor, make
himself familiar with them; for there alone are found the best thoughts
clothed in fittest words; there alone are rightly portrayed the noblest
characters; there alone is the world of men and things transfigured by
the imagination and illumined by the pure light of the mind. True poets
help us to see, they teach us to admire, they lift our thoughts, they
appeal to our higher nature; they give us nobler loves, more exalted
aims, more spiritual purposes; they make us feel that to live for money
or place is to lead a narrow and a slavish life; and to men around whom
the fetters of material and hardening cares are growing, they cry and
bid them--

"Look abroad
And see to what fair countries they are bound."

But even the greatest poets have weaknesses, and are great only by
comparison. There is not one who however he may enchant and strengthen,
does not also disappoint us. The perfect poet the future will bring; and
to his coming we shall look with more eager expectation than if we
foresaw man dowered with wings. The elevation we forebode is of the
soul, not of the body. Progress we have already made.